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To the Happy Couple, and My YouTube Clip

WEDDING toasts can be witty or raunchy. They can be shouted, mumbled or slurred. They can make guests laugh, cry or yawn. But in a video democracy in which guests are often armed with sophisticated cameras, toasts are becoming more like scripted performances.

Scan the topic on YouTube and up pops a growing collection of toasts that were sung, or even rapped.

And where belting out a celebratory tribute was once the province of those with professional performing backgrounds, uninhibited amateurs are increasingly making their mark.

A video of Andrew Spector’s rap toasting his brother Adam and his new sister-in-law, Ilana Bamberger, at their August wedding in Milwaukee has had nearly 20,000 hits on YouTube.

After telling the musicians to “hit it” — twice — Mr. Spector, who was also the best man, laughed and said, “And in case you’re wondering if I can sing, you don’t have to worry about that. There’ll be no singing in this song. It’ll be 100 percent rap.”

At the July wedding of Josh and Julie Krieger in Phoenix, his brothers Joel and Jon Krieger sang, with guitar accompaniment, about how the bridegroom could not pay for movie tickets on the couple’s first date because of a credit card problem. They set their own words to the ballad “Extremes More Than Words” and renamed it “Twenty Bucks.” Among the lyrics:

Doing a “Weird Al thing of taking a popular song that everybody knows and changing the lyrics,” says Jon Krieger, is a bit of a family tradition, one that they hope to continue.

Anne Chertoff, a senior editor at Brides.com, said that songs, raps and dances performed by guests are becoming ever more common.

“I used to hear about this five times a year,” Ms. Chertoff said. “This year, it’s three to five times a month.”

Ms. Chertoff noted that unlike traditional toasts, which can be just a few words or can ramble on until the Champagne gets warm, “You don’t have to wait for laughs. There are no awkward pauses.”

“You’re following a rhythm and a tune,” she said. “Whereas if you’re giving a speech and you get nervous — like if you drop Page 3 — you’re shuffling papers and say, ‘Where was I?’ ”

And amateurs, after repeated exposure to “people who don’t have talent trying out on ‘American Idol,’ ” might have lower inhibitions these days, she added.

The attention might be a motivation for someone perhaps hoping to become “another YouTube phenomenon,” said Tom Haibeck, the author of “Wedding Toasts Made Easy,” who takes a dim view of the practice. “An appropriate toast is really celebrating the marriage and the focus should be on the bride and groom,” he said.

Mr. Haibeck added that a generation raised on, say, “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” tends to confuse sarcasm with humor. “They’re jaded by that humor and not sure of what a real family and a real celebration is all about,” he said.

Mr. Spector, 23, who works for an entertainment market research firm in Milwaukee, said his rap was meant as a gift. “I didn’t do it for YouTube, I did it for my brother,” he said. “There was one thing that kept surfacing in mind — my song had to be something that Adam, Ilana and everyone at that wedding would never forget.”

In any case, performers should beware when clicking through YouTube for ideas, especially when they come to the wedding toast for Amy Miller and Brad Surosky, which has had more than 700,000 hits.

As the couple’s “man of honor,” Michael Kirsch, begins singing his own bouncy lyrics to Frank Loesser’s “Once in Love With Amy,” bridesmaids and guests jump up from tables and burst into song, and before long a chorus line has formed.

“I wish my boyfriend would do something like that when we get married,” went one comment on YouTube, while someone else says, “Now, telling jokes at my sister’s [wedding] won’t be enough. Way to raise the bar!”

But Mr. Kirsch is a professional performer, as is nearly everyone else involved including the bride, who was in “42nd Street” and the bridegroom, a television and film actor.

Still, Ms. Miller, 31, who now lives with Mr. Surosky, also 31, in Los Angeles, said she resisted entreaties to post the video on YouTube for nearly a year after her April 2007 wedding on Sanibel Island, Fla. “It was too special,” she said. “I didn’t want to put it up there.”

Sara Azizollahoff, a literacy coach at Public School 316 in Brooklyn, wanted something elaborate for the wedding of Becky and Steven Shefsky in Tarrytown, N.Y., last year.

“I’ve known Becky for a long time and as soon as she asked me to be her maid of honor, I knew I had to do something special,” she said. “Something Becky and I had bonded over early on is a love of music. So, I put two and two together and came up with the idea to sing her a toast. I chose ‘Eleanor Rigby’ by the Beatles because that is her favorite song.”

But it was not a solo performance. Ms. Azizollahoff, 29, had arranged for the guests to get the lyrics and when she began singing, the entire room joined the chorus:

We are here to toast you

Through good times and through bad

Celebrate together

And we are all so glad.

In an e-mail message, Ms. Shefsky, the bride, wrote: “It was like a 125-person private serenade.

A version of this article appears in print on November 22, 2009, on page ST13 of the New York edition with the headline: To the Happy Couple, and My YouTube Clip. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe